Beslan and the study of violence

“Placing blame: Making sense of Beslan” by Gerard Toal (in this issue) is an insightful analysis of the terrorist attack on Beslanʹs School Number 1, demonstrating how the various actors involved in, and affected by, the attack made sense of it. Toal documents that many of the frames used to justify or interpret the attack employ “indiscriminate blaming.” This commentary raises three points. First, it places the lecture within the recent trend of disaggregating the study of civil war and ethnic conflict. Second, it comments on the lectureʹs assumption that there is a causal link between indiscriminate blaming and violence. Third, it inquires about the sources of indiscriminate blaming.